Towards Reindigenization

I don’t have a job.

Instead, I have a joy.

Working covers my expenses, but most importantly it serves what I most love. Every day, through the meetings and the challenges and the problem solving,  I am privileged to pour out my love into the world.

I have no significant material assets. I am anything but “wealthy”.

But I have tremendous wealth: beloved communities, loved ones, and a life of adventure and service and authenticity. 

Native people speak, Starhawk speaks of the reindigenization of the mind. And I think these things are related.

I know there is a way of seeing the relationships: how things talk with one another. How things aren’t things. Maybe the only real way to understand this is to live so close to the ground that it decides whether or not you eat.

Still, I can hope.

And what if it has been so many centuries,  so many generations that indigeneity is utterly lost? what of those of us who come from nothing but colonizers and enslavers and small men with mean, small and selfish dreams, and oppressed and fuming women?

How do we return then? When we are so impaired, so disabled, so buried in layers of greed and cruelty? When what we have learned to value is so completely divorced from actual value, and we are in a strange land which is simultaneously our home and not?

Is it enough to have recognized that the tale is rotten, that the American dream is empty, that the wild, dancing people this society shits on are the best the world presents?

How do we let go of what we thought we knew, start from nothing and learn… without stealing?

We must invent, not just learn. Because we have no right to what was created by those who preceded us on this land.

This is about the necessary breaking before there can be making. It’s about learning not to be sightless when you can’t see what is important. 

But you have to start by admitting that you can’t see it.

There are oaths and necessary offerings. 

I think perhaps the rituals are the easiest part, but I still need to do them. To bleed into the soil, saying, this is my place too. I pledge, I pledge, I pledge devotion.

Now I begin to listen. 

Now the world opens. Now I am humble before time.

(Community is resilience 

Hope is not weak or naive–hope is audacious. Hope is a weapon.)

“We have been this way before,  and there is much to be learned.”–Carl Sagan

I am aged.

I have habits so deeply ingrained.

But it’s not enough simply to be cynical.

My heart stretches for the joy. For the rightness of proper relation with All That Is.

I fight for my wildness. I refuse the pablum.

(Okay…mostly). 

I bow to what has been learned by those who remember, who inherited it. To them, I listen.

This land, this water. This Sun, this sky. This body. These are real. 

These, I believe in.